Print Media! You let it die! 😵
No, honey, it was just sleeping.
The morning after the election I just couldn’t go on TikTok. After four years of daily and delighted scrolling, overnight it seemed like every video was so loud?
What had once fired off the very pleasure sensors that pulled me through the doldrums of COVID isolation just could not soothe me in this jagged moment.
I wanted quiet. So, while it wasn’t intentional to switch my morning scroll from TikTok to Substack, that is exactly what happened.
To be fair, I’ve seen this coming. I’m a vintage and secondhand fashion reporter, and late last year I began documenting the resurgence of print and long-form media.
Sure, the chorus “Print is Dead! Long Live Print!” has recycled through media circles for decades, but this is not just about print, it’s about a total zeitgeist shift to both text and long-form media. We’re talkin’ full-out 👏 cultural 👏 shift.
90s kid, here. For birthdays growing up, I received an annual magazine gift subscription from an aunt, starting with the American Girl magazine.
(American Girl magazine ran from 1992 until 2019, but — according to a random forum website — they recently trademarked their name in the category of “children's magazines,” so maybe the magazine is returning?! If so, I’m getting all my nieces a subscription…)
Later on I received Seventeen and Teen Vogue. Eventually Vogue, Glamour and Cosmo. It was a great gift — I stand by the power of a subscription gift to this day!
But, by the time I graduated high school in 2009, the magazines I received were so ad-filled (to be honest, nothing compared to how they are now…) that it truly didn’t feel worth transferring my subscriptions to a new college address.
By then, I was deep in the world of early-internet Blogs and YouTube channels, anyway.
(Early fashion blogger,
, posits our media preferences are operating on a trend cycle: Livejournal > MySpace > Lookbook.nu > Blogs & Tumblr > Instagram > TikTok > Substack).A whole generation of women grew up on these same media inputs.
Indeed, there’s a homogeneity to it that would never exist on today’s algorithmically-driven internet. My Pre-Loved Podcast guests reference the same handful of print magazines as part of their fashion origin story — almost as much we cite the Limited Too (which also relaunched in 2024).
Perhaps all that remains to complete the Pre-Loved Podcast ‘nostalgia bingo card’ is to bring back dELiA*s!
And, because the 90s and Y2K rom-coms we all watched peddled such a vision, girls like me dreamed we would one day write for those newspapers and glossy magazines we received by mail each month.
Journalism as dream job, imagine! It was a rose-tinted vision of the publishing industry then, and it’s a world that doesn’t even exist now.
And yet, while everyone knows we can’t “go back,” in both fashion and publishing, nostalgia campaigns are off-the-charts in 2024:
Once-closed print runs like NYLON are printing again, re-running features from their 2000s cover star icons like Zooey Deschanel, Demi Lovato, Hilary Duff, Avril Lavigne for marketing buzz.
Buzz which built to a Paris Hilton cover-star hosting NYLON’s magazine print re-launch party at NYFW. 2003 vibes, that’s so hot.
And to much fanfare, J.Crew re-launched their print catalog this summer — a smart marketing move, amidst the 90s mall-brand’s undoubtable rebound. According to J.Crew’s site, the Fall 2024 run of print catalogs “went fast,” but fans can join the mailing list for future drops, or find remaining catalogs in select IRL stores.
The limited edition catalog spreads featured brand call-backs and film photography, some even intentionally tilted off-kilter (not straightened, as one might expect an Instagram photo to be, for example)
— these photos are screaming: THIS IS ANALOG!
And when the Barn Jacket craze happened later in fall, J.Crew kept their catalog hype going. They announced a capsule collection of vintage barn jackets for sale: “Coming tomorrow: a limited-edition, highly covetable collection of vintage Barn Jackets™, the iconic layer we’ve loved since 1983.”
Nostalgia is more than just reminiscing — it requires a loss. A longing for what is no more. Like receiving that catalog by mail, or dreaming of a job at a fashion magazine. Or, like durable, high-quality jackets our grandkids might covet.
Coolwear ad circa Summer 1996 via @y2kmagazines
But this moment is not just about the nostalgia. As a vintage and secondhand fashion reporter, I live in the space where nostalgia and collectability intersect. We, vintage-lovers, we collect what our present lacks.
First, let’s travel back to what’s a half-remembered memory: it’s a Saturday morning and you’re curled up in an armchair, feet tucked under you, flipping through the pages of your latest magazine. The magazine is a gift to yourself, and so is the charming moment — that special Saturday morning.
But the magazine is also a gift you get to keep.
You can return back to it later, or you can pass it to a friend. You can display it on your coffee table, or — more likely — you can rip out your favorite pages and tack them on your wall. The “keeping” (preserving, displaying, etc.) is as much a part of the thing as is the reading. When was the last time you loved something so much you wanted to spend that kind of time with it?
‘Tear it out and tape it to your bedroom wall’ kind of time with it?
🎧 In this episode of Pre-Loved Podcast, vintage magazine collector Rosie Mae Turner talks about her magazine-collaged bedroom walls. It’s peak 90s rom-com bedroom energy.
2024 has been an era of great Trinketification™ and Baublemaxxing™ — we’re attaching bag charms to everything, and collecting Sonnys Angels like another tchotcke just might save us.
In an economy that revolves around continued consumption of cheap, disposable goods, we regard our things as temporary, briefly passing through our lives. There’s even memes about how “our grandparent’s passed down solid wood furniture, and our generation will pass down — what? A Beanie Baby?”
In this moment, we’re reacting — longing for things we can keep. And own, and collect, and refer back to, and pass on…
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
But, these desires require a return to slowness.
We know legacy media is dying. The Big Name outlets we once dreamed we’d write for were long-ago replaced by early-internet-adopters (Vice, Buzzfeed News) and now those outlets are dying out, too.
It’s a question of business model, which has swung hard from subscription-driven revenue to ad-driven revenue, cobbled together with a soup of affiliate links, where the real value lies in shopping data. (Read “Here’s What Happens When You Buy from a Gift Guide” by
on how affiliate commission rates can influence decisions writers make).
I’m with
, I miss these beauty spreads! And I love that creators like are reviving the craft and making their own interactive little digital magazine spreads in Canva (my god, the creativity!!!!).But, much as we yearn for slow media, can we sustain a slow media model? Here enters our latest media darling: the Substack newsletter.
Bloggers-turned YouTubers-turned social media influencers are moving their long-form, editorial content to Substack. Journalists and fashion editors and thought-leaders are building their own platforms here, as well. And the material feels thoughtful and intentional in a way social media hasn’t allowed for some time. The readership feels it, too.
“If you scroll through the Substack Notes feed on any given day, odds are you will run into at least a couple of posts from the people who just joined the platform that read something like “have been spending a lot more time on Substack than IG and TikTok, and my brain hasn’t felt this good in years.”
But, if newsletters — or the next slow media darling, whatever she may be! — are to claw back what we loved about print and long-form media, the foundation can’t just be nostalgia for the once-loved Legacy fashion magazine. She’s gone.
Those publications once had the exclusive on everything: what’s up-and-coming and what’s trending. If they didn’t have the “hot tip,” they created the buzz and drove the demand. But, in the last decade, they lost that breaking-news power to social media.
Now we, indies, need a different approach.
If I am to spend days pouring into a high-quality, well-researched, fact-checked, informative essay — it won’t be fast. So, slow, indie media can’t rely on timeliness and information alone.
Instead, our advantages lie in being niche and special interest, and extremely perspective-oriented. This view-from-somewhere (someone) media that coalesces a community, gathering subscribers who value thoughtful indies.
True slow media requires more than just subscribers, it needs readers with space to savor it, too, like we once did the magazine.
In the end is it really print media we long for? Or will slow media — will Substack — be the salve? Are we running from TikTok into the arms of someone new?
Or will you tear me out and Restack me to your wall?
Thank you for reading! You can find me across the internet as @emilymstochl on Instagram, TikTok, and Threads! 💛 - Emily